The abandoned village with beautiful new homes where no-one has ever lived | UK | News
These village houses have recently been newly built but have been left empty for years. (Image: Jon Lawrence)
It is nestled among green fields and at first glance it may seem like a small, quaint village with white-fronted houses with red and gray tiled roofs. There’s a street or two and there’s even what looks like a small school or town hall.
But when you look closer, there’s something a little unsettling about the scene. Look as much as you want, you cannot see even a single person. When it gets dark, no light will illuminate the windows and there will be no sound other than the wind and constant rain common in these parts.
There are no paved roads leading to or from this ghost community. Eerily, it looks less like a village and more like an abandoned movie set in the middle of the stage. No one had ever lived here, although it was built only a decade ago and was visited by King Charles when he was Prince of Wales. But there was a time, says digital storyteller and former broadcaster Jay Curtis, when “one of those houses with fresh paint, green grass, and all decorated as a show house” “looked incredible.” Frankly, a lot of time, effort and money went into this. So what happened?
These show homes are a short distance from a busy housing estate but appear to have been long forgotten (Image: Jay Curtis)
The houses were built in traditional Welsh stone using cutting-edge construction techniques in 2013 on the site of a former BP crude oil refinery at Llandarcy, on the outskirts of the town of Neath in south Wales. They were designed as the showcase of an environmentally sustainable village of thousands of new homes and had the backing of then-Prince Charles.
In fact, the development was inspired by the Poundbury development in Dorset and said it was “trying to break the commercial mold with the kind of challenges the world is facing at the moment”. However, 13 years after they were built, the houses are empty and have no infrastructure connections.
Even locals don’t know about this forgotten village (Image: Jay Curtis)
The original vision was for the empty houses to be part of a 25-year renovation project; A £1.2bn environmentally sustainable urban village comprising 4,000 homes, 10,000 residents and four schools. In a sense, this vision succeeded. Not far from the abandoned village, the neat streets of the new Coed Darcy housing estate actually stand on the vast, dirty ruins of the UK’s first crude oil plant, which closed in 1997. After years of intense land remediation—removing pollution, chemicals, and hazards left behind by decades of refinery—construction has begun.
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Around 250 homes have been built and are currently lived in at Coed Darcy, while roads to connect the development to nearby Neath and even the city of Swansea have been planned but not completed. The empty hamlet was built as a showcase, a test village designed to demonstrate what could be achieved on the former refinery site. These early houses were built ahead of the surrounding infrastructure and were intended to fold into a larger structure as they expanded. But expansion never came.
The hamlet is located minutes away from the M4 motorway, where thousands of motorists pass every day, unaware of what lies just beyond the road. There are no sidewalks leading inland, no open access roads, yet locals report signs of activity.
The cluster of tiny houses was intended to be swallowed by more development that never came. (Image: Jon Lawrence)
Around 250 homes have been built nearby as part of the new development (Image: Rob Browne)
The process of making the area safe for people to live and work has been a long one. Developer St Modwen has removed 125 kilometers of pipe and cable from the refinery site, recovering 1.25 million liters of oil from the lakes and ponds surrounding the site. But since the process began, wildlife has returned to the area as trees and plants become less and less contaminated.
St Modwen’s Tom Gough made reference to vacant homes when he spoke to WalesOnline in 2019: “Buildings were built to test design and construction techniques and used to showcase new ways of building homes. Often they were built much earlier than you would as test homes and they sit there ready to be occupied. What’s not in place is the infrastructure, such as roads, that was often in place first.”
When asked whether these houses would be lived in, he replied: “Our intention is that the houses will eventually be used as part of a wider plan.”
Coed Darcy, a new inhabited mansion, and perhaps one day, the abandoned village will also disappear. (Image: Rob Browne)
Dozens of homes were built, but nowhere near the 4,000 initially projected (Image: Jon Lawrence)
But elsewhere a tiny community of homes sits empty (Image: Jon Myers)
But locals have long questioned what is happening in the area, and some believe there is still some oil on the land.
Seren Craven, a regular walker in the woods near Coed Darcy, told WalesOnline in 2019: “The water around it is so disgusting and you can still see quite a bit of the oil being rejected by the soil.”
Over time, houses began to succumb to nature. Process shells from walls. The grass turned uneven and brown. Once ornamental lakes now stand empty. Jay, who visited the site recently and took the striking, frightening photos, believes ongoing pollution may still be part of the problem.
“People said they saw the lights on at two o’clock in the morning,” Jay told WalesOnline recently.
“Vehicles come and go at odd times. There’s something going on there – no one’s sure what. It surprises people to have this level of excitement, a royal visit, this much ambition, and then see it all just fall apart. These are big, expensive houses. There’s lots of them. And no one’s ever moved in.”
